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| a “word ladder” comic by Kevin Raganit (SVA 2010) |
Over on the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures Flickr photostream (new link coming soon! —MM) I just posted a whole bunch of weird and excellent comics done by School of Visual Arts cartooning majors over the last few years in a class of mine called Obstacle Course. In the class I present them with a series of assignments based on creative rules or constraints.
If you follow this blog or my work you already know this is approach—closely associated with the French literary group Oulipo—is key to my own work.
The first part of the set consists of one-page assignments, the second part consists of longer pieces delving deeper into a particular constraint. Each new comic has a description and, if necessary, explanation (with links) of the rule used to generate that work.
If you like what you see and live in the NYC area, I will be offering a several-week workshop on this topic at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) in the spring. Details to follow. (Of course, if you are an SVA student and are reading this you an sign up from my class this spring or next year!)
I had to squint to see the word-ladder context there in the sample, but then I realized it's terrific. Really perfect.
Kevin wrote those keywords in for the critique in class but didn't necessarily mean for them to be part of the final comic. I should probably remove them but I admit that part of the fun of these comics is seeing how the words turn into comics.